Searchfox Beta Report: Day 1.5

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It’s a bit of an overstatement to say that I’ve had an actual half day to play with Searchfox since the last update, but there is one item that I wanted to get down here.

Dave Winer’s River of News approach appeals to me, even though it’s not the way that I currently consume. Searchfox seems like a nice step in that direction, as the personalization seems to provide some pretty decent shape to the flow…in general stuff that is interesting to me does tend to move towards the top of the list.

With the good, however, comes the bad: the items that I’ve read or clicked through within a given day generally get very high scores for a little while, which means that as the day progresses more and more of the top items are things that I’ve already checked out:

So while I’m liking the personalization so far, seems like there are a variety of productive tweaking opportunities. Having an “unread items only” view would take care of the concern above pretty easily. The other intriguing direction is giving me some direct control over the personalization factors: I’m guessing that it’s some sort of bayesian magic happening in the background, so why not give me the option of manually entering and ranking terms that I haven’t yet come across in posts but would like to see?